A Family Business Built On Udder Cream

A successful family business has been built, exclusively on udder cream. Over the holidays, at a small, old-fashioned birdseed and garden shop in rural Connecticut, an eye-catching tube of hand cream at the register grabbed my attention. It’s black and white spotted packaging – a practically universal logo for cows, forced me to read the fine print. “Originally developed for use on dairy cows,” it said. I’m a sucker for a good back-story, so I forked over a few bucks and gave it to a friend as a stocking stuffer. He just happens to be training for an Ironman.

With that trifecta of transactions, the impulse buy, the add-on gift and as a salve for skin chafed from hours of cycling and running, I became a “typical” Udderly Smooth Udder Cream customer.

”We get calls around the holidays from people who have received these and they don't know what to do with it; they think its either a gag gift, or a joke. We actually have to man the phones with extra people to field these calls,” Linda Kuzior tells me.

Udderly Smooth

She and her siblings run the family business her father, Bill Kennedy established in Salem, Ohio in the 1970s. Kennedy is a pharmacist who worked with animal health preparations, including cream for dairy cows. He and his wife started out supplying to farmers who used Udderly Smooth on their cattle, until the farmers noticed the same cream softened and soothed their ranch-roughed hands. As the story goes, farmers began keeping two containers of the cream – one on the farm, and one in the house. It may not be obvious what happened next.

“We got a lot of letters from people who quilt. People who do needlework were one of the first groups we started to work with. Some told us if they use it they get more stitches per inch. It was more responsive than actively seeking a niche market for our product. That was the first branching out in the human market.”

Close proximity to Ohio’s Amish country, knitting shops and craft shows provided them with plenty of distribution outlets. And then, there was the Oprah effect.

“A model was on Oprah and mentioned she used Udderly Smooth, so we then had people going to farmers markets and cooperatives looking for our product. For us to produce 50 cases of our product was quite a risk, we didn't know how it would sell. Now, we look back and 50 cases is not even a half hour of production. It took about ten years for it to be recognized in the human market.”